[quote]President Barack Obama offered an apology Thursday to those Americans who have been told they’re losing their health insurance plans, contrary to his promise that no one would be forced off a plan they wanted to keep. “I am sorry that they are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me,” the president said in a Thursday interview with NBC News, offering his first mea culpa for an issue that’s generated negative headlines for the White House for the past two weeks. At this point, Obama said, the administration is communicating with and accommodating those whose plans have been cancelled. “We’ve got to work hard to make sure that they know we hear them and we are going to do everything we can to deal with folks who find themselves in a tough position as a consequence of this,” he said. Obama’s comments come as he faces continued pressure to both explain the claim he made for years that Americans who liked their health insurance plans wouldn’t lose them under the Affordable Care Act and fix the “glitches” that continue to plague HealthCare.gov. Millions of Americans have in recent weeks gotten cancellation notices from their insurers, and Obama and others in the White House had previously argued that those decisions were the companies’ to make, even though many were based on needing to meet the minimum requirements of the ACA. Speaking at an Organizing for Action event earlier this week, Obama was far less conciliatory than he was on Thursday. “If you had one of these plans before the Affordable Care Act came into law and you really liked that plan, what we said was you can keep it if it hasn’t changed since the law passed,” he said on Monday, though what he’d said since fighting for ACA’s passage was only the first part of that line. In Boston last week, Obama was even less sympathetic, saying that he’d promised that Americans could be grandfathered in to keep “substandard” plans they had when the ACA passed, but that it wasn’t his fault if insurers chose to cancel or change those plans. “Ever since the law was passed, if insurers decided to downgrade or cancel these substandard plans, what we said under the law is, you’ve got to replace them with quality, comprehensive coverage because that too was a central premise of the Affordable Care Act from the very beginning,” he said. [/quote]